DSL or Cable???? (1 Viewer)

[John*Jones]

while i think john makes some pretty good points i believe it is important to emphasize again that policy, speed and pricing differ greatly with location.

i have had cable in tucson for over a year now and during that time i was tempted to switch to qwest dsl, because of the difficulties of hosting a game server on cable (no dedicated upstream). unfortunately for $10/month more they could only provide 256kbps up and down (not to mention the fact that the person i spoke with had little knowledge of the service and tried to connvince me it was 256KBytes, not 256Kbits...even her supervisor was stumped on that one). with cable i am consistently getting speeds over 3300kbps down and 270kbps up. so for me the gain in dedicated upstream with dsl was far outweighed by the huge gain in downstream with cable. that being said, if dsl services were offered with a 1.5mbps downstream "here" i think i'd probably switch.

i guess what i am trying to say is that not to write-off either cable or dsl from the start. do research and take advantage the wealth of knowledge, experiences and opinions from sources like dslreports.com. hopefully in the end you'll pick whatever is best for you and that's all that really matters.

now if only i get speeds of OptimumOnline...

 

[John_Berger]

do research and take advantage the wealth of knowledge, experiences and opinions from sources like dslreports.com.

That's the best place to go for anything DSL related.
Keep in mind that it's not always completely accurate, though. I first had Verizon and had to get away when I realized how incompetent their technical support people are (or at least were). DSL reports claimed that Covad was not available in my area, but a call to Covad said that they actually were and I switched immediately.
Distance from the nearest telephone central office is the biggest key. Once you go beyond the 10,000 foot mark, DSL is not very desirable or reliable.
I will admit to being a bit spoiled by DSL since I'm only 4,500 feet away from my CO. I can get 7.1 Mb download speeds if I could only convince my wife to spend the extra money for it.

 

[MikeAlletto]

Obviously, any porn kiddie who's making his downloads on the same node as you will impact your connection. You won't have that with DSL.

DSL will be no different, the bottleneck is just moved further down the line instead of in your neighborhood. Remember you're only going to go as fast as the slowest part of the line. Whether that occurs just outside your house or down the street where all the neighborhoods converge doesn't make any difference in the end.

 

[Brian Ruth]

My hunch would be to try DSL, but that would probably depend on where you live.
Certain parts of the country (read: certain Baby Bells) have faster DSL than others, and I'd say that $50 price is only worth it if you're getting above 2 Mbps download speeds.
The DSL I have now is actually the slowest DSL in the country. I think it's overpriced, though for the speed (~100KB per second downloads) I'm willing to grit my teeth and bear it.
I think that as time goes on, cable connections will get slower and slower. Bandwidth IS shared throughout neighborhoods, so if you have a pimple-faced neighbor downloading illicit videos off KaZaa, your bandwidth will suffer. It MAY be worth the $5 you save, but you'll have to decide. If YOU DO end up with cable, realize that it will likely get slower bit by bit in the next few years.
So its basically a tradeoff either way - pay more for a dedicated (and usually faster) line, or pay less for a shared (and usually slower) line that will likely get slower over time.
Tough call!

 

[Andrew Walbert]

My experience with DSL has been fine up until I connected a third PC onto the network. Other than my main PC and the media server on the network, my sister is sharing the connection with me on her PC. Unfortunately, it she's downloading anything at all, my available bandwidth gets chopped up, and playing games online becomes nearly impossible because of lag. I've talked to others in the area who have Comcast Cable Internet access, and they've all said that they are able to download large files at high speeds (often at better than 100kb/s) while still playing games with little to no lag. I've never seen a burst over 60kb/s on my dsl connection which is supposedly capped at 640kb/s. As for upstream, it's currently capped at 160kb/s, but I've yet to see better than about 12-15kb/s.

In theory, cable offers the highest transfer rates, but it depends on how many people are using the service on your node. ADSL offers a more consistent speed, but cable has a higher peak rate than all other DSL in a similar price range (obviously, SDSL is going to often be faster than cable, but it's outragously expensive).

Bottom line, talk to your neighbors. If they almost all have DSL, ask what rates they get. If one or two have cable and get great rates, you might want to consider cable because you won't be sharing the bandwidth with too many people. On the other hand, if nearly all have cable, then DSL is most likely the only decent option.

 

[Brian Ruth]

Andrew:
Your speeds actually seem ok.
Realize that connection speeds are referenced in kiloBITS per second instead of kiloBYTES.
Divide 640 by 8 and you get the correct speed in bytes - 80 KB per second.
Divide 160 by 8 to get your correct upload speed in kilobytes - 20.
As for your sister downloading/uploading - you can actually CAP upload speeds (the most likely culprit for your speed problems) if she's using KaZaa (which a majority of n00b filesharers including myself are using). Just go to Tools > Options, click on the advanced tab, and set the maximum upload limit in bytes. 64 should allow you to play games more smoothly.

 

[Brian_Tho]

Roadrunner!!!!

 

[Paul McElligott]

Cable should only get "slower and slower" if your provider does a piss-poor job of maintaining their network. Part of the $35-45 a month that you're paying should be going to new equipment and upgrades.

I've been on Cox or @home and I've not noticed any appreciable slowdown.

 

[Andrew Walbert]

Yeah, I factored the bit/byte conversion into my thinking. I've just never seen a burst over 60KB/s, even though I should be able to get as much as 80KB/s. I've also had a few too many outages in the past year for my liking, which is why I'm probably going to switch over to Comcast Internet soon. Of course, I loath Comcast's idea of customer service, but I'd rather deal with that than have to shut down Kazaa Lite or disconnect all the network cables but the one for my machine every time I want to play a game.

 

[John_Berger]

The company I am currently getting my DSL service from is goin belly up.

Mark, who is your current DSL provider? It's not uncommon for another DSL provider to come in with a "safety net" plan under these circumstances, so I'm sort of surprised that you apparently have not been offered such an opportunity.

 

[Ken.Nischan]

I will admit to being a bit spoiled by DSL since I'm only 4,500 feet away from my CO. I can get 7.1 Mb download speeds if I could only convince my wife to spend the extra money for it.

I envy you the possibility heh.. When I was living in York, PA I was told when I signed up that Verizon had the option but they couldn't give it to me in my area. I have since moved to Baltimore and again, no option. -sigh- I'm on a 1 meg synch DSL line now.
Either way, I agree that DSL is the way to go. But one comment.. it's true that on cable you will get drug down by your neighbors always, but even on DSL it's possible. Your connection still has to go through your ISP's pipe to the net so you could theoretically still be drug down. I was using a Mom-N-Pop ISP in York on a 768k SDSL line. I had given a friend an account on my active directory and he apparently terminal serviced in, ran Kazaa and was downloading so much stuff that my ISP called me at work because I was knocking his other clients off because I was sucking his pipe dry Apparently he had my circuit configured as burstable to his max capacity and didn't realize it hehe. Normally this wouldn't happen as the ISP would cap you to the bandwidth you pay for. Just thought it was amusing

 

[DeepakJR]

Go with Road Runner! Ive had it since last April and outages happen once a month for maintenance. Although the customer service SUCKS, I never have to call them unless I want to complain. I get great pings and great download speeds. IVe peaked downloading at 577 KiloBYTES per second, and uploading at 125 KiloBYTES per second. Pretty good if you ask me. Im paying $55 a month because I do not have cable, buts its really worht it. Im running 1 wired computer, 2 wireless computers, PS2, and XBOX. They all run really smooth and i cant say enough about the pings, theyre just awesome. At DSL Reports I get 2194 Kbps downstream and 356 upstream.

L8rz,
Deepak Jr.

 

[Seth_S]

When both DSL (from Bell Atlantic) and Cable (from Comcast) came to my area (center-city Philadelphia), I chose DSL because of the horror stories I read in the WSJ about how in Boston during midterms, everyone's cable connection would slow to a 28k modem because cable is a shared connection. I ended up dropping DSL after a year because the service would crash about twice every month leaving me without DSL for 1-2 days. Also, we run a network at my house with 3-4 users. When 3 or more users were on the internet, download speed would slow down significantly. I switched to Comcast a little over a year and despite the large number of people in my neighborhood who also have it, I've never had a problem with speed.

 

[Mark Leiter]

Thnaks everyone for your responses and opinions. I think we've pretty much decided to try out cable. Since there's no contract to get locked up into. If after a few months the service is not up to par, then we could always switch at that time.

Once again thanks all for the input.

Mark